What is it?
Nearly one-third of food produced is discarded before consumption. More than 50% of food waste occurs during the upstream process such as production, handling, etc., with the rest happening during downstream processes such as distribution, consumption. It can happen due to oversupply of the market, retailers throwing out edible food they consider subpar, consumers throwing it out, and others.
The environmental impacts are large, as it has an effect on many areas of the environment, including but not limited to, climate change and natural resource depletion.
One-quarter of GHG emissions result from food waste - as it degrades, it emits gases up to 25 times more harmful than CO2 emissions.
The impacts are due not solely to the degradation of food products in landfills, but also to the processes involved in producing food such as water use, land-use change, and energy consumption.
Nearly 800 million people suffer from malnutrition worldwide. With the population expected to increase by 2.3 billion people by 2030, food production would have to increase by 56% to feed this growing population. However, the current food production is sufficient to feed the world’s population twice over, if it was all used effectively rather than wasted.
Nearly one-third of food produced is discarded before consumption. Power imbalances in the supply chain are largely responsible for the continued waste, with large-scale companies dictating how food is produced and processed, externalising waste to the producers and consumers alike.
The economic burden of food waste is roughly USD940 billion annually, rising to USD2.6 trillion when accounting for the cost of environmental issues. Food waste has a significant impact on the market; higher waste influences demand in such a way that causes rising food stock prices, causing risk to people with minimum income who cannot afford to spend more on food.
Sources
https://www.epa.gov/international-cooperation/international-efforts-wasted-food-recovery
The Environmental Impact of Food Waste | Move For Hunger
Environmental impacts of food waste: Learnings and challenges from a case study on UK
The Social Impact of Food Waste
Community social capital and status: The social dilemma of food waste